WORDS ON THE WALL

I didn’t know where I was going. My feet just pedalled and my hands steered and my mind became blank. I forgot all about Papa dead and gone, and Mama lying in bed for days. I didn’t have room in my head to think about Ralf and Martin or about Oma and Opa keeping me in the house like a prisoner.

The people in the street were a blur as I whizzed by. Men and women who hardly paid any attention to me at all. Everyone just going about their business.

I zipped along the main road, and turned down a side street before racing through a maze of alleyways running along the back of some large houses. The cobbled lanes jiggered me up and down so much that it blurred my vision, but I kept on and on and on. Faster and faster.

Until I saw the writing on the wall.

It was right there, on the bricks at the end of the alley, staring me in the face.

ETERNAL WAR ON THE HITLER YOUTH

As soon as I saw it, I squeezed the brakes and came to a stop.

Written in white paint, each letter was at least as big as my hand. I had seen things written on walls before, but they were always about the Jews, never something like this. Perhaps it was Jews who had written this, as some kind of protest. I stared at those letters wondering what they really meant and who had written them, and the longer I stared, the more I felt as if they were saying something to me. I just didn’t know what it was.

When I closed my eyes, the large white letters seemed to be burnt onto the inside of my eyelids.

Eventually, I shook my head and pushed off once more, cycling right at the letters as if I were going to crash through them. I turned at the end of the alley, glad to leave them behind, but as I rode along the next lane, there were more letters painted on the wall beside me.

HITLER

I slowed down and read them as I passed.

IS

These letters were bigger.

KILLING

Written in the same white paint.

OUR

Shining as if they were still slightly wet.

FATHERS

My heart lurched at the message and then tightened at the sight of the symbol painted at the end of the slogan. As big as the letters, it clung to the wall like a giant full stop.

It was crude, not a very good painting, but I recognised the shape.

It was the same as I had seen on Stefan’s jacket.

Once again, I squeezed my brakes and came to a standstill. I stared at the flower, realising that these words had probably not been written by Jews. If they had been, then the symbol would have been a Star of David, not a flower. The star was their emblem.

I tried to make sense of it. It had to mean something. It had to.

And my brother Stefan was connected to it in some way.

I leaned my bike against the kerb and stepped closer to the wall where I could smell the paint. I put out a hand and touched the centre of the flower. The paint was still tacky and when I pulled away, there were white spots on my fingertips. It was fresh; someone had just done this.

If I was quick enough, I might be able to see them.

I jumped back onto my bike and drove the pedals hard, leaving the letters behind. I didn’t care about the cobbles now, and I juddered and jerked, the bike wheels slipping on the smooth, uneven stones as I rushed to the end of the alley. I looked each way, deciding to go right, and then I was off again, searching, searching, searching.

Riding up and down the streets and lanes and alleys, I didn’t find whoever had painted the slogans. Instead, I found more flowers on the walls, more words telling me that Hitler was killing our fathers, and each time I saw them, I wondered why the Führer would want to kill our fathers. It didn’t make any sense.

I must have been cycling for half an hour, maybe more, looking for the vandals, hardly thinking of anything other than those words, when I found myself in front of the school.

It wasn’t as big as the school I went to in the city, but there were two large buildings with a good-sized yard and a wire fence surrounding the whole place. Where I was standing, there was a tall, thick pole with an air raid siren at the top of it like two upside-down dinner plates painted red. When the sirens went off, they made the most terrible racket, so I moved further along the fence, just in case.

The yard was filled with children. The boys on one side, all in Deutsches Jungvolk uniform and arranged into lines, the girls on the other side, wearing shorts and vests and doing their exercises.

The girls were swinging hoops over their heads and from side to side, but the boys were jumping up and down and doing press-ups. I watched the boys and wished I were with them, making myself fitter and stronger. The more I wished it, the more I felt my anger and frustration rising, as it had done before, and I remembered what I had said to Oma and Opa; that perhaps I should report them.

That would have been the proper thing to do; what my group leader would have told me to do, and what my friends would have done – go to the police station or Gestapo Headquarters by the river and report Oma and Opa. Then they’d have to let me go to school and join the Deutsches Jungvolk.

As I was thinking about it, I glanced over at the girls and caught sight of the one I’d seen leaving her house this morning. She was standing in line with the others, twisting her hoop, but she wasn’t looking ahead like she was supposed to. Instead, she had turned to watch me, and she was smiling.

I checked behind to make sure she really was watching me, and when I looked back, she let go of her hoop with one hand and lifted it – not high, but high enough for me to know she was waving at me.

Which was when the teacher noticed.

‘Lisa Herz!’ the woman shouted, then turned to see what Lisa was looking at, and caught sight of me right away.

The teacher was a short woman with her hair tied back in such a tight bun that it stretched her face. Her clothes were modest and smart – a dark skirt to her calves and a jacket that matched. As soon as she spotted me, she began marching across the yard in my direction, shouting, ‘You! Boy!’

I wasn’t supposed to be out. I wasn’t even supposed to exist. Not here. Not in this town. I was breaking so many rules it made my head spin and I froze to the spot. I’d just been thinking about reporting Oma and Opa, and now the reality of being caught was so close, I saw the truth of what might happen if the teacher stopped and questioned me. Maybe she would call the Gestapo and Oma and Opa would get into serious trouble. Maybe the SS would take us all away to a camp like they had taken Stefan.

‘Boy!’

Now everyone was looking at me. All the children had turned to see what was happening, and the man who had been instructing the boys was starting to come over, too. As the teachers marched towards me, and all the children stared, an image came into my head. It was like the films we sometimes saw at the theatre, except Oma and Opa were the stars of this one. They were sad; shoulders hunched, hands in chains, as they shuffled to the truck to be taken away to a camp. All because of me.

I glanced at Lisa Herz, the girl who had waved, and noticed that she was doing something with her hands. It was hard to focus because so many things were going through my head, but she was doing something.

What is it? What is she trying to tell me?

She kept her hands low so no one would notice, but she was flicking them at me as if shooing away a cat.

‘Go,’ she mouthed. ‘Run.’

And that was it. The spell was broken.

I grabbed my bike and began wheeling it away as fast as I could, putting one foot on the pedal as the teachers came closer to the fence.

‘Stop!’ the man shouted.

I swung my other leg over and used the momentum to push down hard on the pedal.

‘Come back!’

I was rushing away now, the wind flying about me once again, my heart racing and thumping in my chest.

I pedalled hard and fast, but this time the excitement was long gone. Instead, I was filled with feelings I hardly understood as my thoughts twisted together; the fear of being caught; of Oma and Opa getting into trouble; the shame of imagining myself reporting them.

I put my head down, hunched over the handlebars and worked and worked and rode and rode and pedalled and pedalled and went faster and faster and faster.

I raced away from the school without glancing back, turning this way and that, hurtling through the streets and rushing down a cobbled alley that shook the bike and rattled my bones. The walls flew past on either side but I hardly noticed them as I bumped and jostled and headed for the end of the alley and shot out into the road.

The blast of the horn snapped me out of my confusion.

A loud, sharp, long blast that was too late to warn me.

Then everything was slow motion.

To my right, I saw a black Mercedes car heading straight for me. It was shiny and sleek, with a glimmering silver bumper that reflected the morning sunshine.

The driver’s eyes opened wide in surprise and he leaned back in his seat, arms outstretched, fingers gripping the wheel as he jammed on the brakes.

The car screeched towards me and I closed my eyes and felt the shock of the bumper smashing into my bike.

Then I was in the air.

For what felt like a good ten seconds, I touched nothing and nothing touched me.

I was flying.

Floating.

Falling.

Hitting.

I landed on the road with a sickening crunch.

My hands touched the ground first, then my elbows and my knees as I skidded across the hard surface, scraping my skin and collecting tiny pieces of grit in my flesh. My chin cracked against the kerb, clattering my teeth together, and I came to a stop with an ‘oof’ that shot the air out of my lungs.

‘… all right?’ someone was saying. ‘Boy?’

I opened my eyes to see a pair of shoes close to my face. Shiny black shoes.

‘… hear me?’

Someone put a hand on my shoulder and shook me. He seemed fuzzy, my head was a jumble and my vision was blurred.

‘Are – you – all – right?’ the smart-suited man asked as I turned onto my back and sat up.

There was blood on my palms and little black spots of grit under my skin. My knees were the same, and as soon as I looked at them, they started to throb with pain.

A few people had stopped on the opposite side of the road to see what had happened. Some had come to the windows of their houses when they heard the crash, or had ventured outside and waited by open doors, but none of them came to help. None of them came near except for the man in the suit.

‘Do you always rush out into the road without looking?’ Every word seemed to drip with poison.

I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Well, I don’t think “sorry” is going to fix my car, is it?’ He waved a hand at the vehicle and I looked across to see a faint dent in the shiny bumper. Hardly much more than a scratch.

‘Or your bicycle,’ he said.

My bike was lying a few metres away, at the side of the road, the front wheel bent out of shape.

‘It can go for scrap,’ the man said. ‘To help the war effort.’ He turned around and looked at the people on the other side of the road. ‘Someone bring this boy a damp cloth and a glass of water.’

For a moment, no one moved. They stared at the man in the suit, then glanced at one another.

‘Come on then,’ he snapped. ‘One of you. Get on with it.’

It was as if the man in the suit had reached out and slapped them each on the face. Suddenly, they were breaking apart; some of them going back into the houses, others rushing towards the shop on the corner.

‘We haven’t met,’ he said, looking down at me. ‘So perhaps I should introduce myself. My name is Gerhard Wolff. Kriminalinspektor Gerhard Wolff.’

The man from the Gestapo.